"Microsoft has been absolutely pummeled in the press and in reader comments this week by pundits and customers alike. They feel cheated by the amount of free storage space available to them on the new line of Surface Pro devices. But is that criticism fair or even valid?" Spoiler alert: turns out, it isn't. Both devices have about the same free space available, and by creating a USB restore drive for Windows on the Surface, you can actually get a little more on the Surface Pro. Interestingly enough, Microsoft confirmed on Reddit that their original numbers - which caused the ruckus - were wrong, because they were based on pre-production hardware, with debug code and other additional stuff on it. Oh Microsoft.

Can't these little marketing suckers from Microsoft just rebrand the deceptive 64 GB (Holy Hell, f--king 64 GB bloated !) into a more reasonable 16 GB version and the obese 128 GB (huge number with more FAT (c) Microsoft) into a more understandable 64 GB version ? It's just a matter of perception, and people WILL gets pleased to find 23 GB free on the "16 GB" version and 83 GB free on the "64 GB" one...

They should, especially since the ratio between the OS and user data is so unbalanced. Imagine you buy a 64 GB USB disk, right now you really get 59.6 GiB usable. Minus some factory installed software, you get basically 93% of advertised space.

On the 64 GB Surface, you get 33% of advertised space, 61% on the 128 GB version. As a user I don't give a fuck at what decided manufacturers to trick the numbers, I fell somewhat cheated. Because you cannot expect the OS to take so much space, I got used of such software located in NAND flash or ROM.